An API for text scanning (based upon regular expressions) and formatting
(in the spirit of C's printf procedure).  This API will bring regular
expressions and a compact notation for formatted output to the Java
platform.

N/A

In progress for Tiger.  --  xxxxx@xxxxx  2002/2/20

The scanner API has been approved and the first implementation putback.
 xxxxx@xxxxx  2003-09-22

So when is the Merlin release with regular expressions 
going to be available?

> formatted output ...
> on a par with other popular platforms ...

Not.

jsr-51-comments at jcp.org assures me we shouldn't read 
jsr/detail/051.jsp as a promise of console i/o that works.

Vote at bugs/4071281.html if you care.  Be sure to notice 
even System.err is broke if you use System.in to read lines 
in.

"JSR-051" here means
http://jcp.org/jsr/detail/051.jsp

Ugh!  How can the scanner API be considered as a 'solution'
to not having scanf in Java???

This single line:

sscanf(myString, "%[^abcw-z] %*d %l %n", &myLong, &myInt);

Is not even remotely possible with the scanner API, and
taking away the fancier bits of sscanf, even just

sscanf(myString, "%d %d %d %d", &a, &b, &c &d);

Is many many lines of code in Java using the Scanner API
rather than the concise C representation.

If the class primitives types (Integer, Float etc...)
weren't invariant, you'd have a perfect solution with the
addition of varargs and autboxing that were added in 1.5. 
An almost direct scanf work-alike would be possible. But as
it is, this is *not* possible and is one of the biggest
omissions in the language.

The Scanner API is *not* a solution to this issue!